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Student record 2015/16 - Student instance FTE

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Student record 2015/16

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Student instance FTE


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Typefield
Short nameSTULOAD
Description

This field holds the student FTE, representing the provider's best academic judgement of the full-time equivalence of the student (for this instance) during the reporting year 1 August - 31 July. The value can be recorded to one decimal place and must be between 0 and 300.

Applicable toEngland Northern Ireland Scotland Wales
Coverage

All instances where Instance.REDUCEDI = 00, 01 or 03

Notes

Full-time, full year students would normally be returned as 100 and part-time students returned as a proportion of an equivalent full-time course. Comparisons and weightings of different full-time, full year courses are not expected. The proportion of part-time study can be estimated on either a 'time' or a 'credit' basis. The FTE should not be weighted to take account of any resourcing implications of different courses.

All students following a course would initially be assumed to have the same FTE. An adjustment may need to be made at individual student level if a student did not actually follow the whole course academic year, e.g. because they left half way through. This individual student adjustment need only be at a very broad-brush level.

The calculation of FTE therefore becomes a function of proportion (that the course represents of a full-time benchmark course) x time (amount of the course that the student followed in the HESA reporting year).

It is recognised that this cannot be exact in all cases and a strict pro-rata model is not expected. The aim is to give a better approximation than the use of arbitrary conversion factors.

In the case of years of programme which span two HESA reporting years (for example an MSc student with a 01 October - 30 September year) providers in Scotland can return the FTE using either the pro-rata (50:50), 100:0 or 0:100 method as indicated in Instance.FTEMETHOD. However for providers in England, Wales and Northern Ireland the Student FTE should be split across the two HESA reporting years. This does not have to be an exact pro-rata split: a reasonable approximation is sufficient (for example the provider might assume that 85% of the FTE related to the period October - July and 15% to the period August - September).

For students coded 'S - Studying abroad and included in the Student record as student has spent or will spend more than 8 weeks in the UK' in Instance.LOCSDY, Instance.STULOAD must reflect only that part of the course undertaken in the UK.

This field must be completed for writing-up students. From 2010/11 providers are advised that the FTE allocated to writing-up students should be 10% for both full and part-time students. The 10% applies where the student has been writing-up for a full year. Where a student has only been writing up for part of the year the FTE should be adjusted accordingly. For example, a student who studies part-time at a 50% intensity for six months of the year, and is then writing up for the other six months of the year, should have a STULOAD of 30 (50*6/12 + 10*6/12) returned.

For students undertaking Early Years ITT courses, if it is not possible to record their actual STULOAD, the NCTL have indicated that it is permissible to return 100.0.

The length of this field is 5 characters, however the move to XML enables data to be returned with or without leading zeros or the decimal place, e.g. 005.0 or 5.0 or 5

Examples

Example A student studying the equivalent of a three year course over five years would be returned as 60.

A student studying 30 credits in the current year, in the case where 120 credits is the norm for a full-time student, would be returned as 25.

Quality rules
Quality rules relating to this field are displayed here.
Reason required

To allow analysis by FTE, representing student load, rather than by headcount or apportioned numbers; particularly significant for analysing load and allocations of funding for part-time students.

Part of
Field length5
Minimum occurrences0
Maximum occurrences1
Schema components
Element: STULOAD
Data type: FTEType
OwnerHESA
Version1.0

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